AMD vs. NVIDIA - who really won in HD 6850 and GTX 460 battle

The dust is beginning to settle a weekend on from the launch of AMD's Radeon HD 6850 and HD 6870 graphics cards. Having now sifted through the hyperbole and bombast from NVIDIA and AMD over the past week, with both companies eager to promote the virtues of their graphics cards and supporting ecosystems, it's time to take stock and dole out a little advice, I think.

The one thing i am amazed at is the performance they have achieved with this refresh on the same die size and the fact that its so much more efficient. With the added features such as HDMI 1.4a and support for 3D, AMD has done an amazing job with this refresh. I can only imagine what they will do with the 6900 series.

i agree as well but then you're missing things in the ATI solution that come in nVidia cards (ie Physx). also, some games cater to nVidia cards (ie Just Cause 2).

so while you might get a little better performance with it in crossfire, you're missing stuff. also, nVidia cards are typically better supported.

edit: and next year when new nVidia cards start dropping, i'm getting rid of one of my 460's for a more powerful card. should make for another good SLI setup

edit2: and from looking at those benchmarks, i wouldn't say it's blowing away the 460's in SLI vs crossfire. i think with a driver update, the performance for the 460's in SLI will match single card benchmarks regarding 6850 vs 460. so yah, pretty much a tie

edit3: yeah look at Mafia II SLI vs Crossfire. and i'm not sure how they're getting such high FPS @ 1680x1050 because that is certainly not what i get. i get closer to 65FPS. maybe my SLI isn't configured correctly hmmm

Its very close. I personally look to amd for my gpu needs though. They seem to be doing better than nvidia currently. I can also see them getting better since the AMD company is bigger than nVidias since they do more than just gpu's.

and how exactly would a game cater to an AMD card besides running slightly better? what i mean by cater is have features/settings in the game that you can turn on with one card but not the other. as far as i know, AMD doesn't have any features that are missing from nVidia cards. maybe i should've worded it like that in my first reply.

an example of a feature would be Physx, which is missing from AMD solutions.

completely disagree with that. 480 takes a lot of power, emits more noise and heat.

2 460's in SLI blows it away. period. better performance, cheaper (at least it was), less heat, less noise (yep even outta two of 'em), less power consumption. i did a LOT of research when the new fermi cards started coming out. esp since this was my first rig.

One feature i like that AMD cards have over Nvidia's current setup is multi monitor support. With the 5xxx series and 6xxx series you can buy just one GPU and hook up three monitors. With Nvidia's solution you need to run SLI. As for Physics. It's going to get interesting. Read this article.

That's a nice gain...I got a GTX 460 768 right now...I think it might be worth it to get a 6870. Physx is a huge drain on resources so I always have it turned off: not a huge loss to me. But the real factor is "which one folds better?"

I kind of regret getting 2x 460 1GBs because i could have gotten 2x 6870s for the same price 2 months later. And I wouldn't have needed a board that supported SLI since my previous one supported crossfire.

I was gonna get two HD 5850 in CF but now I'm getting 2 HD 6870 in CF. Never know might change my mind once the HD 6950 and HD 6970 get released but right now a HD 6870 for $230 x 2 = $460 nothing is better but a GTX 480 sli set up.

But keep in mind the HD 6870 uses less electricity produce less heat and makes less noise than a gtx 480 and doesn't require a 1200 watt PSU.

The Nvidia cards have Physx but so far I can live without that until a game comes along that does Physx like Metro 2033 does graphics.

I have yet to see a game where Physx blew me away and you can radically tell the difference. It's just not there yet. And in the very near future its going to get interesting as Bullet (AMD is supporting this) is gaining lots of traction because it's open source and free. PhysX is not a compelling feature set when Havok and Bullet is out.

The cards are comparable and the prices are as well. Once the 6850 gets some rebates and newegg combos I will probably grab one of those but you can't really go wrong in the $150-200 GPU market right now. On a budget build having the option to Crossfire on newer boards (and having to use older generation boards to SLI) is the main reason I will be going AMD this time. Better upgrade path in my budget range for comparable price and performance.

Just got my amd 6870 yesterday and it performs extremely well compared to my amd 4850. Crysis, i get around 26/60 fps max ..... average 32 fps all on high settings and 8AA, and the resolution is 1920/1080.